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375 reviews for:
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Sasha Sagan
4.11 AVERAGE
375 reviews for:
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Sasha Sagan
4.11 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
After getting so much out of Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual, I had really high hopes for this one. And I think those high hopes are ultimately what ended up being the problem.
I had expected this to be similar to The Power of Ritual – why humans like and/or need rituals, what makes them meaningful, and what kinds of rituals we do. I was also hoping for some more how-to, some sort of instruction manual for creating my own meaningful rituals in a secular life. But that’s not really what I got. This is mostly memoir, combining Sasha’s memories of her father and her childhood, the secular rituals she experienced growing up, her experience with Jewish rituals as a secular Jew, and her hopes for ritual-making with her baby daughter.
It’s divided into chapters focusing on the different kinds of rituals that humans have done across the centuries. The main themes are seasons of nature (winter, spring, summer, fall) and seasons of the human life (birth, puberty, marriage, death). Sasha touches briefly on traditions across the world around these seasons, and illustrates each one with her life and the rituals she experienced – either from the wider American culture, her Jewish heritage, or ones she or her parents created – around those seasons.
This feels in many ways like an overview. I learned a lot more about Jewish life-phase rituals from Here All Along and more about seasons of nature rituals from my own research during my pagan phase. I did find the insights about how many disparate rituals can be grouped under the categories of “seasons of nature” or “important times in the human life cycle” interesting, and I appreciated the connections Sasha drew between so many different religious and cultural traditions. But the heart of this book is memoir – Sasha’s life as Carl Sagan’s daughter, her childhood, and her hopes for her daughter in the future. I think I would have been more interested in the memoir aspect if I knew anything about Carl Sagan and had that connection to draw on.
This is not a bad book. In fact, it was quite interesting in a lot of ways. I had just hoped for more information about how to set up rituals and make them meaningful in a secular life, and did not expect it to be so much memoir.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Death, Death of parent
Minor: Medical content
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
Great perspective shift. Cadence was a little predictable… but that also sort of matches the theme of the book so it was fitting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief, Death of parent
reflective
medium-paced
This book finds wonder, joy, and magic in all aspects of life through a secular, scientific perspective. She explores ways to create rituals through this perspective that celebrate this wonder, taking nothing from religious traditions. A wonderful book worth a read.
Beautiful and thought provoking. I can relate to so much of what she observes.
So much to love here -- with great suggestions for how to flourish "from this obscured vantage point of being alive."
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
“No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.”
I sort of needed this book right now. Life feels (is?) bleak, but we are here, and we have things to celebrate. It’s not toxic positivity - Sagan doesn’t force happiness upon us. Just a reminder to marvel at the complete strangeness and wonder that any of this happens at all.
I sort of needed this book right now. Life feels (is?) bleak, but we are here, and we have things to celebrate. It’s not toxic positivity - Sagan doesn’t force happiness upon us. Just a reminder to marvel at the complete strangeness and wonder that any of this happens at all.
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Very thought-provoking book. Now I want to go back and read something by Carl Sagan.